The University of Hawaiʻi Warriors’ recent loss on the road to the UNLV Rebels marked more than a fall to a Mountain West Conference foe.

The game also had the kind of environmental implications that increasingly concern organizers of big-time sports events: a massive carbon footprint. That’s an inescapable reality for Hawaiʻi’s athletics program, where the Warriors’ air travel for that game alone produced an estimated 122,732 kilograms of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of driving a Tacoma pickup truck from Kaimukī to Haleʻiwa and back more than 5,000 times.

That doesn’t account for the fans who traveled 2,700 miles to the disappointing away game, which dropped UH’s conference record to four wins and three losses.

Jeff Mikulina, a climate consultant who helped craft Hawaiʻi’s energy policy, says it’s important not to vilify sports events as polluters, but instead take a look at their impact to gain a better understanding of aviation’s role in the state’s carbon footprint.

“People love sports,” Mikulina said. “Let’s not demonize it, but let’s use it as a catalyst to say, ‘How can we travel and enjoy this entertainment and this pastime without burdening our climate?’”

That idea has animated a growing movement. The International Olympic Committee has announced goals to reduce emissions related to the Olympic Games by 50% by 2030 and created webpages outlining wide-ranging climate action policies and reports on recent games. Academics at big football universities, meanwhile, have started studying how expanded, transcontinental conferences have increased emissions linked to major football games.

University of Hawaiʻi Athletic Director Matt Elliott wasn’t familiar with the work the IOC is doing but said it is something the UH athletics department might look into. More broadly, he said, assessing sustainability related to UH’s sports team travel “is … I think something that we can absolutely think about.”

“What are we doing to help protect this environment here?” he said. “What can we do as an athletics department?”

The work is unfolding as the Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation struggles to comply with a legal settlement requiring the state to decarbonize transportation in Hawaiʻi entirely by 2045. Dealing with aviation has proven to be the biggest challenge, and the transportation department has said the technology doesn’t exist to meet the settlement requirement.

Impacts of Tourism Are Enormous

Sports events are far from the only contributor to aviation emissions in Hawaiʻi. In 2018, Civil Beat estimated the carbon footprint of travel to and from the islands by tourists using emissions calculators from a United Nations aviation agency and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, as well as 2017 travel data from the Hawaii Tourism Authority.

The analysis found that the 3.8 million visitors from the western U.S. alone that year produced emissions roughly equal to those produced by driving a car around the equator 225,000 times. Gov. Josh Green is now seeking to address tourism’s negative side effects with an additional hotel tax to go toward environmental mitigation.

Like tourism, sports are considered optional activities by many, compared to travel for work and family. Sports-related travel provides another window into carbon emissions, in part because of college football, which has captured the attention of sustainability researchers. Although all sports-related travel generates carbon emissions, football is the biggest, given the small army of players, coaches and staff that travel for games.

Formulas and studies offering insights have followed. Last year, Molly Russell and Paige Greenberg, two graduate students at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainability Systems, studied the carbon emissions of air travel by their popular college team, the Wolverines.

Motivated by the prospect of big television deals, USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington had just joined the Big 10 Conference, originally the exclusive domain of Midwest universities, joining relative newcomers such as Rutgers and Maryland to create a transcontinental, 18-team super-conference. A non-conference home game against the University of Texas piqued the grad students’ interest in air travel after a Michigan news site reported a parade of private jets landing at local airports.

They decided to tackle the question of what conference expansion meant for the planet, using a formula created by researchers at Arizona State University. A central question was how public policies designed to decrease carbon emissions jibed with having students fly all over the continent to play football.

“Institutions like the University of Michigan (U-M) are increasingly committed to sustainability,” they wrote, “raising questions about how to reconcile environmental goals with the realities of increased carbon emissions.”

They found that the conference’s geographic expansion would more than double emissions related to Michigan football games.

Solutions Include Sustainable Aviation Fuel

The University of Hawaiʻi doesn’t need to shift conferences to face this quandary because it’s always had to travel a long way to the continent, regardless of what conference it was in. While that has always been costly, Elliott doesn’t see distance and location as a disadvantage — especially when it comes to recruiting players, hosting games and being central to the community.

“The story is there’s a huge advantage to being here,” he said. “Students want to be here. We get to retain our local athletes. We can recruit students who want to come play in this special place.”

Hawaiʻi’s isolation also makes home games particularly special.

“Because we are isolated, because we are kind of in our own space, I think it brings people with this energy and passion for the university,” he said.

With that comes the inconvenient reality of a gigantic emissions impact. Using the formula created at Arizona State in consultation with the University of Michigan’s Russell, Civil Beat found that football teams and staff traveling to and from Hawaiʻi for games in 2025 will have produced an estimated 1.5 million kilograms of CO2. Mikulina pegs that to the amount of emissions produced by providing electricity to 400 Oʻahu homes in a year.

Mikulina says the point of the calculations isn’t to deride UH football but rather raise awareness as motivation for change. He points to the International Olympic Committee as an example.

The 2024 Paris Olympics were powered entirely with renewable energy, the IOC’s website devoted to event says. Where generators were needed, it relied on biofuel, hydrogen or batteries. Organizers used existing venues to cut construction-related emissions and low-carbon construction methods to build a new aquatics center. Bike lanes were built for visitors so they could ride carbon-free to venues. Athletes were ferried to competitions via electric, hybrid and hydrogen-powered vehicles.

Air travel remains a major contributor to the International Olympic Committee’s corporate carbon footprint, accounting for about 61% of its emissions, which the IOC openly discusses on a website laying out its climate action plan.

Regardless of whether this amounts to greenwashing or significant change, Mikulina said, the IOC’s efforts are raising awareness.

“Everybody loves the Olympics,” he said. “And now people are thinking about the impact it has and the opportunities we have to reduce emissions.”

For now, airlines and policymakers are looking at lower carbon sustainable aviation fuel, essentially the jet equivalent of biodiesel, to replace traditional jet fuel. And the Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation is calling for tax incentives to help refine more bio-jet fuel locally. The department also is looking at running airports more sustainably by adding more electric support vehicles and electric vehicle charging stations.

Hawaiʻi has made some big gains in reducing climate impacts in the electricity sector, he said. But concerning aviation, he said, “we’re on first down with the whole field in front of us.”